The Kitten Hunt

by Anna Wilson

  I smirked. ‘You got stuck,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Kaboodle irritably. ‘You promised you wouldn’t laugh.’

  I bit the insides of my cheeks and nodded.

  ‘So, I got stuck,’ Kaboodle went on in a tight-lipped way, ‘and I, well, I suppose I panicked. In fact, I cried out for help, if you must know.’ he added.

  ‘And?’ I prompted, digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands.

  ‘Ms P heard me, of course,’ he said, gritting his teeth. ‘She would recognize my voice from a mile away. She came out, flapping and wailing and protesting that I would never be able to get down. Nonsense, naturally. We felines always get out of scrapes of our own accord in the end – it just takes a little time. A nyway, Ms P got your father to come out and try to save me – all well and good, except, of course, your father is about as much use as a kipper in a kettle when it comes to saving anyone. He doesn’t like heights, does he? So he wasn’t about to climb up a ladder and try and get me the conventional way. Oh no. Especially as apparently it was “too dark” for that. He decided it would be a good idea to go to the upstairs window, lean out and tie a length of rope to the branch I was hanging from, because apparently it would be simple for me to walk to the edge of the branch and in through the open window.’

  ‘Sounds brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he’s quite the genius, isn’the, your dad?’ asked Kaboodle, his voice drenched in sarcasm. ‘And I’m sure his amazing brainwave would have worked too, except that Ms P distracted him, didn’t she? She was frightened your father was about to fall out of the upstairs window, so she made a lunge for his legs and yelled to him not to lean out too far. He promptly lost his footing and let go of the rope; the branch pinged back, and I went flying over the wall, crashed into the washing that your next-door neighbour had stupidly left out overnight and ended up in the fish pond with a pair of outsized lacy knickers wrapped around my head,’ Kaboodle ended grumpily.

  As Kaboodle’s description reached its conclusion, I bit down on my lip and tried hard to focus on breathing, so that the tidal wave of laughter forcing its way up inside me would not explode and wake Jazz. But as soon as Kaboodle mentioned the word ‘knickers’, I lost control and couldn’t hold it in any longer. I collapsed into hysterics, clutching my sides and hooting until I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Oh! Oh! That is just too hilarious!’ I eventually managed to squawk.

  There was a thump from under me as I realized too late that Jazz was stirring.

  Kaboodle shot me a look of pure disgust and leaped back on to the windowsill.

  ‘Hey, come back!’ I hissed. ‘What about Dad? Did you see what he and Ms P were up to?’

  Kaboodle was already halfway out of the top window, his front paws gripping on to the opening, his back legs dangling and scrabbling to get himself free. He glanced back at me and spat, ‘As if I’m going to tell you now! I don’t appreciate being laughed at, you know.’

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’ came a blurry voice from below.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘I just had a nightmare. I’m OK now . Go back to sleep.’

  ‘You had a nightmare?’ Kaboodle sneered, as he finally managed to get a grip and flipped himself out of the top of the window. ‘The nightmare’s only just begun, my dear,’ he mewed as he disappeared from sight.

  What did that mean?

  ‘Don’t go!’ I called.

  Too late. He’d gone.

  Suddenly Jazz was out of bed and peering at the window in the gloom. ‘I heard a noise. Did you hear a noise? What if it’s a burglar?’

  ‘A cat burglar more like,’ I muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Really, it’s nothing, Jazz. I told you – I had a nightmare. I couldn’t sleep so I went over to the window to look at the moon and stuff.’

  Jazz was still only half awake, luckily for me, so she padded back to her bed and mumbled something about it being freezing. Within seconds snoring wafted up again from the bunk below. I crept down the ladder again and tiptoed over to the window. ‘Kaboodle?’ I whispered.

  Nothing.

  I tried again, but I didn’t want to risk waking Jazz, so I couldn’t raise my voice enough to make myself heard.

  I sadly turned from the window and started back to bed, when I heard a tiny mew from behind one curtain and Kaboodle stuck his head out.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ I whispered, turning round. ‘I thought you’d left.’

  ‘Oh, sorry? Did you want to talk to me? I thought I was only good for a bit of fun – an hilarious event to be LAUGHED at,’ Kaboodle spat.

  I bit back a hasty retort. I didn’t want to start another argument.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’ Then, because I really needed to get back to the matter in hand, ‘So, where were we?’

  Kaboodle purred to acknowledge my apology.

  I let him walk into my arms and carried him gently back to bed. We snuggled into the comfy position we’d been in before and Kaboodle quietly said, ‘I’m afraid you are not going to like this, Bertie, so please don’t get cross with me like you did last time.’

  I gulped. My throat was dry. I wished I had got that glass of water after all. ‘OK,’ I muttered.

  Kaboodle’s tail twitched and he looked up at me, fixing me with those deep pools of honey. ‘I’m sorry, Bertie, but I think you were definitely right to be worried.’

  My eyes prickled and I swallowed hard.

  Kaboodle went on hastily. ‘And I think it’s serious – I heard them talking about spending more time together and how important it was to “see this thing through”.’

  ‘Who said that?’ I rasped.

  ‘Your dad. He said once he’d started something he liked to see it through to its conclusion and that he needed Ms P’s commitment, one hundred per cent.’

  I blinked hard. Commitment! This was bad. Seriously bad.

  Kaboodle went on, ‘Then she said that he was absolutely wonderful and the answer to all her dreams, and he said, “No, no Fenella, it’s you who are the wonderful one”—’

  ‘Stop,’ I croaked. My hands were clammy.

  Kaboodle licked me gently. ‘You don’t want me to tell you any more?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s more?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, your dad did say, “Fenella, I don’t know how to thank you. Meeting you has changed my life. Nothing so exciting has happened to me in years.”’

  I stared at him in silence. Well, what on earth was there to say?

  17

  Scene You Shoudn’t See

  The next morning, I was up and dressed as soon as the light had crept in around the edges of the curtains.

  ‘Bertie?’Jazz had woken up and was yawning widely and stretching. She looked a bit like a crumpled version of Kaboodle after one of his catnaps, except that her braids were tangled and some had flopped over her face. ‘Why are you pacing up and down like that? What’s the time?’

  ‘I – I’ve got to get home, Jazz,’ I mumbled, and started stuffing my PJs and things into the bag I’d brought with me.

  ‘Hey, slow down!’Jazz cried, sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes. ‘I’ve only just woken up. Don’t you want to make breakfast?’

  Jazz’s parents liked to take things easy most weekends, so Jazz and I were allowed to put ourselves in charge of breakfast and made yummy stuff like pancakes or waffles or bacon and eggs.

  ‘Not hungry,’ I said sulkily.

  Jazz sighed. ‘You still worried about your dad?’ she asked, swinging her legs out of bed. She came over and put her arm around me. She smelt warm and sleepy. I put my head on her shoulder and gave a shuddery sigh. ‘Hey, don’t worry. We ’ll find out exactly what’s going on and then we’ll come right out with it and ask your dad about it and tell him you’re upset.’

  I jerked my head up and stared at her, horrified. ‘I can’t do that!’ I protested. ‘I mean, I want to know what’s going on, but I really
, really do not want to talk to Dad about his love life!’

  ‘I know.’ Jazz said soothingly, as though she was trying to calm a frightened puppy, ‘But maybe you’ll discover you’ve got the wrong end of the stick and then you won’t have to talk to your dad about anything after all.’

  I bristled when she said this. What did she know? Dad had talked about commitment to Pinkella! He’d said ‘nothing this exciting had happened to him for years’! If that didn’t mean they were in love, I didn’t know what did. But I couldn’t tell Jazz any of this. She’d want to know how I knew.

  Jazz was right about one thing, though. I did need to find out more, and I needed to find out a way of surprising Dad and Pinkella when they were together so that I could confront them. But Jazz was going to be as much use as a firework in a wheelie bin when it came to spying on Dad. She always got so overexcited and carried away. She wouldn’t be able to creep around and act invisible to find out the information we needed.

  Only a cat could do that.

  I agreed to make the pancakes anyway as it was only half past eight, and it was not as though I could achieve much in the way of spying at that time on a Saturday morning.

  ‘You need something to keep your strength up,’Jazz assured me. So for the next hour or so, I was back to being a normal eleven-year-old, cooking with my best friend, laughing and dancing to the music on the radio, while Tyson made the most of his parents having a lie-in and ate his body-weight in maple syrup – and smeared a load more of it over his face and in his hair Personally I was on course to set the world record for the amount of chocolate spread to be consumed in one sitting (which kind of showed a fatal flaw in my previous statement that I was ‘not hungry’).

  Eventually, though, the facts had to be faced. ‘I’ve gotta go, Jazz,’ I said, as we stacked the dishwasher and wiped the table. ‘Don’t forget we’ve got a ton of homework, which might even possibly be worse than Dad being in love !’ I tried to joke, but it came out rather hollow-sounding.

  ‘Wooooo!’ Ty son jeered unhelpfully. ‘In LURVE!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Jazz barked, whacking him professionally on the back of the head. He went off howling to find their mum.

  Jazz rolled her eyes at the sound of her little brother wailing and her mum complaining, then she put her head on one side and examined me carefully. ‘Listen, don’t get too stressy, OK? I’ve got modern and tap later, but you will come and tell me what’s up after, won’t you?’ She put an arm round me and squeezed me to her.

  ‘Hmm.’

  Dad wasn’t in when I got back. I ran through the house shouting for him, throwing open all the doors and even checking in the garden, not that Dad goes out there unless he is forced into mowing the lawn because it is about to engulf the house like some hairy, green, house-eating monster.

  I was beginning to panic. Dad is never out unless it’s something to do with work which he’s told me about a million times in advance. In any case, what on earth would require him to do research on a Saturday morning at ten o’clock? Surely even Mrs Moany Miggins and her Sticky-Beak Brigade didn’t need interviewing about car parks at that time on a weekend?

  I was about to run back to Jazz’s when there was a rustle in the leaves above my head and a pitiful ‘mew!’

  I looked up. ‘Stuck again, are we?’ I cried, seeing Kaboodle balancing precariously on the end of a branch, which was sending showers of autumn-ye llow leaves cascading into my hair. ‘Hey! Stop jiggling the branch like that!’ I protested, shaking my head and brushing the leaves off me. ‘My hair’s enough of a nightmare without any further foliage decoration, thank you very much.’

  ‘Sorry I’m sure,’ squeaked Kaboodle, his ears flat and his eyes wide with alarm. ‘And for your information, I am not stuck –’ Sure, you don’t look it at all. ‘I have been trying to get your attention for the past five minutes, while you have been rustling around the garden like a demented hound on the scent of a rabbit.’

  ‘Charming,’ I snorted. ‘Why don’t you jump down then?’

  ‘All in good time,’ said Kaboodle, wobbling even more dangerously and holding on with his claws fully extended as if his life depended on it. ‘I have some news for you.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, bracing myself. ‘Come on then, spit it out.’

  Kaboodle waved his tail tetchily at me and bared his teeth as if he really was going to spit.

  ‘All right, all right! No need to be like that,’ I said. ‘Here, jump into my arms. I’ll catch you – promise.’

  Kaboodle put his head on one side as if assessing the situation and then flung himself through the air, his four legs sticking out, coming towards me like a mini black furry kite tumbling out of the sky.

  ‘Ooof!’ I caught him with some difficulty as his claws were still out. ‘Don’t scratch! There, you’re OK now,’ I soothed, stroking his back once he’d settled himself in my arms.

  Kaboodle started purring and washing a paw as if he had not been fearing for his life five seconds earlier, but merely taking an early morning rooftop stroll.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘perhaps you could do me a favour now?’

  Kaboodle stopped washing and looked up at me quizzically. ‘Yes?’

  I came straight to the point. ‘Dad’s not here. I’m starting to think he might be at your place.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kaboodle carelessly. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. Your dad went over to Ms P’s early this morning and they are in the sitting room.’

  He wriggled out of my arms, jumped nimbly to the ground and starting trotting off in the direction of the side path that led to the front of the house.

  My jaw had dropped to below my knees and someone had superglued my feet to the ground.

  Kaboodle glanced over his shoulder at me. ‘What are you waiting for? Come on!’

  Somehow I managed to communicate to my feet that they should wrench themselves off the grass and move in Kaboodle’s direction, but my brain had gone into shut-down mode. I couldn’t face thinking about what I was going to see if I followed Kaboodle across the road. Somewhere in the depths of my mind I made a decision to do as the kitten told me, and soon I was sneaking down Pinkella’s side path and into her garden.

  ‘Leave this first part to me,’ Kaboodle instructed. ‘I will go in through the cat flap and act the cute little kitty-cat so as not to arouse suspicion. I’ll curl up somewhere near Ms P and your dad so that I can watch and hear everything that is going on. How does that sound?’

  I nodded and then hissed, ‘Just don’t get too comfy, Kaboodle. I don’t want you dozing off like you did last time.’ I gulped. My stomach was a churning mass of writhing worms and I suddenly wished I hadn’t had that last pancake. ‘OK – in you go.’ I motioned towards the cat flap. ‘I’ll sit on the bench out here.’

  Kaboodle stepped lightly into the house and was gone. I sat down. Then I stood up. I wished I’d brought a book or something. I wished I’d brought Jazz. I wished I hadn’t agreed to follow Kaboodle here at all.

  I paced around the garden, counting each step to try and distract myself. I glanced at my watch. Kaboodle had only been in there five minutes. What if he had to stay in there for half an hour until he found out anything useful?

  I didn’t think I could hang around any longer. It was doing my head in. I was just about to stomp off home and wait for Dad to eventually come back, when Kaboodle hurtled through the cat flap as though someone had just set his tail alight.

  ‘I think you should come – NOW!’ he insisted.

  ‘Whoa! Hold on a minute!’ I shouted, holding a hand up to stop him. ‘You’ve got to tell me what’s going on first – I’m not charging into Ms P’s uninvited only to discover her and Dad . . . well, her and Dad doing what exactly?’ I finished queasily.

  Kaboodle was washing his chest furiously and refusing to meet my eye. Risking being scratched into oblivion, I scooped him up, catching him unawares. Cupping his little heart-shaped face in my free hand I said, ‘Tell – me – Kaboo
dle.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ he mewed.

  I waited, holding on to him as tightly as I could.

  Kaboodle wriggled slightly, but gave up when it was obvious he wasn’t going anywhere without me. ‘OK, OK!’ he squealed finally. ‘But let go of me, can’t you?’ I did as he asked and he shook himself irritably. ‘Follow me.’

  Kaboodle headed into the house and made his way to the kitchen. I tried to follow in a calm and collected manner, but inside my head I was scream-ing, ‘Let me at ’em!’

  We appeared in the doorway of the living room in time to see my Dad on one knee, gazing adoringly at Pinkella while she gushed, ‘Oh my darling man! You are the answer to all my dreams!’

  And Dad replied, ‘No, no, Fenella – it’s you who has made this so perfect.’

  A strangled exclamation halfway between a shriek and a sob escaped from my mouth and Dad tore his eyes away from Fenella to see me standing there, my jaw hanging open, my hands limp at my sides.

  ‘Bertie!’ he cried.

  I turned and ran back out the way I had come, nearly stamping on Kaboodle in the process and causing him to yowl in fright. I didn’t care though. I didn’t care about anything other than getting away from the appalling scene I had just witnessed.

  Dad had asked Pinkella to marry him, and she had just accepted.

  Pinkella was going to be my new mum.

  18

  Out in the Cold

  I kept on running until I reached the park where I sat down on a bench and cried and cried and cried.

  A few days ago, my only worry had been Kaboodle trying to make off with Houdini and Mr Nibbles as meals on wheels. Now Kaboodle’s owner was the one trying to make off with something: my dad. And it was pretty obvious where this left me – out in the cold. No wonder that Pink Permutation had sucked up to me so much and asked me to look after her beloved pussy-wussy-catkins. She’d had her eye on Dad all along. She had used me to get to him. She had—

  ‘Berrrrrtie?’

  It was Kaboodle, purring like a hairdryer on overdrive and winding his way round my legs.